1. Technical Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to communication systems; and, more particularly, it relates to receiver processing within communication systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. There is oftentimes a design motivation to increase the speed of processing, at both ends of a communication channel, to be as fast as possible in an effort to maximize throughput within the system. In a typical communication receiver application that receives a multiple access signal, such as a broadcast signal, there is a lot of received data that is processed and never used. As an example, in a broadcast system, a communication receiver will typically decode all of the data of a received channel before selecting and extracting the data specifically appropriate for that communication receiver.
A typical such communication receiver may often be described as follows: a signal is received from a communication channel. A demodulator will take this received signal and calculate soft symbol decisions of received symbols of that received signal. These soft symbol decisions, in a stream format, are then passed to a decoder that generates hard decisions from those soft symbol decisions that are then output from the decoder in a bit stream format. This bit stream may then be passed onto some higher level applications that will then determine which portions of the bit stream are destined for this communication receiver. Those portions of the bit stream that are not intended for this communication receiver may then be discarded. In this situation, a lot of processing is performed on portions the received signal that are never used. This prior art approach is inherently consumptive of the processing capabilities of the communication receiver, in that, a great deal of processing is performed on data that is received, but not necessarily intended to be used, by the communication receiver.
Therefore, there exists a need in the art for a more efficient way to perform processing of received data that will be less consumptive of the communication receiver's processing capabilities without suffering degradation in performance.